


Tether

by heytheremisterblue



Category: Half-Life
Genre: F/M, One Shot, Pining, Written Before Half-Life: Alyx
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-05-02 11:31:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19197892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heytheremisterblue/pseuds/heytheremisterblue
Summary: Alyx realizes her feelings. Just a crappy oneshot I slapped together. You could call it a prequel to After The Storm if you really wanted to.





	Tether

This was a moment she had been preparing for her entire life. Her father had talked about it constantly, the day he would come back after his mysterious disappearance and deliver them from the life they had been living for the past two decades. This was it. She’d better say something cool.

As she loomed over him, regaining his bearings after being effectively tased by a CP, she smiled calmly and uttered the words, “Dr. Freeman, I presume?”

Nailed it.

As she helped him up she remarked to herself that he looked much younger than she had expected. Her dad and Dr. Kleiner had told so many stories of his work at Black Mesa, being no more than a decade younger than Eli when they had worked together; she imagined him to be more gruff, weathered and torn, age pulling the skin of his face downwards and wrinkling it at all the corners. Maybe a peppering of gray or white hair, even, to match the bright white of her father’s previously black curls. In reality, contrary to nearly all of her assumptions, he had just shown up looking like a 20-something, youthful and clearly frightened. Did he have any idea what had happened while he was gone? Where even _was_ he?

“Man of few words, aren’t you?”

Freeman looked… scared. She hadn’t imagined scared. He fiddled uncomfortably with his hands, picking at something under one of his fingernails, and blinked as he averted his gaze. He looked as though he was trying his best to be friendly while also struggling to stay together. She could only assume he was entirely out of his element here.

The One Free Man, the Opener of the Way, lord and savior of the Resistance here to, well, save them--and he was scared.

He looked less frail and crumbling once he had surrounded himself in the metal armor of the HEV suit. He looked a little bigger and taller, stronger, more like the person she had pictured. As he emerged from the small storage unit that had held the suit, he looked down at his gloved hands and she saw his jaw harden, his eyes glaze over. He was sinking back into the mindset of carnage and responsibility.

That was the first time she ever saw him in the flesh, and she was none the wiser to how enthralled she would later grow to be.

The second time she saw him he had somehow managed to make it all the way from Dr. Kleiner’s outpost in the middle of City 17 to Black Mesa East, on foot (and airboat), by himself. Getting to East in half a day was already a feat in and of itself, but adding the constant threat of Civil Protection and Combine gunships, he had to be a freak of nature. He looked tired, dirtied, bruised and banged up. Definitely not the same man she’d seen just that morning. The corners of his mouth turned up only so slightly in a shell shocked, pursed-lipped smile when he spoke to Eli, who seemed completely unfazed by the state of the man standing before him. Her father must’ve known something she didn’t to be so completely okay with the idea of him remaining so young.

And then, as fathers do, he saw a man around the same age as his daughter and immediately began to tease them with the idea of romance, sending Alyx covering her face in exasperation and Dr. Freeman coughing awkwardly. 

She watched him become an absolute natural with the gravity gun with hardly any instruction from her; it was as if the triggers were made for his fingers. Initially he was clearly terrified to see Dog run out from his house when he most likely expected an actual, fluffy dog, but it only took a few short minutes for him to warm up to him and play catch as if he had forgotten everything else happening around them. Until, of course, the Combine found them, sending them running for escape and severing their path for now. She regretted sending him through Ravenholm.

The third time she saw him was on a TV screen. The signal shook tremendously and was full of grain, but she could still see how exhausted he was after being cast into the hell that was the ruins of the old mining town. And now, regretfully, she would have to throw him into another ring of hell to rescue her father from Nova Prospekt.

She felt horrible for him, she really did. Her family had talked and talked about his accomplishments, his bravery, his abilities, but was that really what he was? No, it wasn’t. He was terrified, full to the brim with fatigue, and just trying to hold himself together out of fear he might crack like an egg. He was doing what was expected of him. Saving the world probably wasn’t in his job description.

She saw a softness in his eyes she hadn’t prepared herself to see. Brilliant green, hidden by glasses, though he sometimes removed them to clean them and she saw the treasure underneath. By the time Dr. Breen was killed she had seen just enough of Gordon to notice the crinkle of his skin by his eyes when he grinned, which he had been doing more of the more time they’d spent together. He was warming up to her, and she enjoyed it. She didn’t remember when she started calling him Gordon instead of Dr. Freeman. He didn’t seem to mind.

Alyx didn’t fully realize how attached to his presence she had become until she couldn’t find him in the rubble surrounding the Citadel. She panicked. There was something so… so instinctual about fighting next to him, she came to learn even more as they traversed City 17’s ruins through their attempt to get the hell out of dodge before the core blew. She tried her best to break through his walls with little jokes and whatever breeziness she could conjure, but her quips went unlaughed at, minimal smirks at best. It had only been three or four days since their first meeting and yet she felt a desperate need to get to know him, to take a sledgehammer to that stoic facade and see what he had on the inside, whether clean or messy. She’d get to him. If it took her ages, she’d do it. 

And then she died. 

The first face she saw when her soul returned to this plane was his. He was there; he saved her. When her father died, he was there. When they were in the helicopter on their way to meet Judith, he was there. When she wept and shivered in the freezing Arctic outpost in the middle of the night, he was there with an extra blanket. When she nearly died again, when they all nearly died, he fixed it. He was always there. She peeked over his walls and saw in sometimes, a beautiful city within him that would glow in sunlight with just a little bit of cleaning.

When they boarded that helicopter to return home to White Forest, and he looked at her for the very first time with a real, relieved smile, she realized she loved him. 

Oh, that’s just great.


End file.
